A defence of the political thought of Henri de Saint-Simon
A progressive inegalitarian in post-revolutionary France
Let us suppose that all of a sudden France loses fifty each of its best physicists, chemists, physiologists, mathematicians… its two hundred best merchants and six hundred best farmers [etc.]… making in all the three thousand best scientists, artists, and artisans in France… Of all the Frenchmen they are the most useful to their country, bringing it the most glory and doing most to promote civilisation and its prosperity. The nation would become a lifeless corpse as soon as it lost them… Let us proceed to another supposition. Let us say that France… has the misfortune to lose on the same day Monsieur the King’s brother, Monseigneur the duc d’Angoulême, Monseigneur the duc de Berry, Monseigneur the duc d’Orléans [etc.] … This accident would certainly distress the French … but this loss of the thirty thousand individuals who are deemed the most important in the State would grieve them only from a purely sentimental point of view, for it would not result in any political harm to the state.
So wrote Henri de Saint-Simon in what is now known as the Political Parable. (He would face arrest for naming members of the royal family as useless idlers.) I wish to argue here that Saint-Simon’s political writings have direct importance for shaping nascent meritocratic thought. Already, I can hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? Wasn’t Saint-Simon a socialist, whom Engels praises in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific? Am I trying to dampen the flames of the progressive right, to neuter it into an ersatz folk populism, or a ‘blue socialism’, with yet another dreary call to ‘fund the NHS and hang the paedos’, with defences of Edmund Burke and Christopher Lasch to follow? In response to such ferocious accusations, I ask the reader to wait patiently and allow me to plead my case. Whilst Michael Young, father of Toby, first coined the term meritocracy in 1958 – in a book in which he aimed to satirise the concept – it was Saint-Simon who has given the fullest defence of the meritocratic principle for social organisation so far – sans Mikkagroyper, of course.
I concede that, for the English reader, Saint-Simon is known, if at all, as one of the ‘utopian socialists’ whom Marx criticises in the third section of the Communist Manifesto, alongside Charles Fourier and Robert Owen. Marx criticises these ‘utopians’ for being people who ‘habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class’; too focused on painting ‘fantastic pictures of future society’.
Saint-Simon is so often only read second-hand through Marx’s critique, and thus relegated an undeserving intellectual obscurity, as ‘some Feuerbach or Dühring… the unfortunate butt of some brilliant analysis’. For the Right, Saint-Simon is now known as a naïve thinker whose hopes for the universal brotherhood of man ultimately led to the mass murder of millions in the second half of the twentieth century. For the Left, he is a good-intentioned but idealistic precursor to Marx and Engels’s development of a scientific socialism, who is only of interest insofar as he influenced that greater thinker. To many others, he was a half-mad millenarian who dreamed of a ‘New Christianity’: his death sparked the creation of a mystical cult among his followers. Either way, the study of Saint-Simon is demoted to a kind of intellectual antiquarianism, alongside the studies of other discredited ideas, like ‘hysteria’, or ‘phlogiston’.
The problem with these readings is that they are second-hand, cribbed from Marx’s polemic. When reading Saint-Simon on his own terms, it becomes apparent that Marx significantly misrepresents his thought: indeed, in paraphrase of Voltaire, it is not clear that Saint-Simon was a utopian or a socialist at all. The reader does not yet have to be convinced of his importance. I simply plead that Saint-Simon should not be immediately relegated to intellectual obscurity or dismissed out-of-hand by the Right.
Like all thinkers, Saint-Simon’s thought was an intellectual response to the political environment in which he lived. As such, it is worth giving a brief biography. Saint-Simon was born in the last days of France’s ancien régime to a distinguished (though poor) noble family who claimed to be able to trace their lineage back to Charlemagne. Although he was initially a supporter of the Revolution and renounced his noble ancestry, taking the plebian name Claude-Henri Bonhomme (cf. ‘Philippe Égalité’), he was imprisoned during the Terror on suspicion of engaging in counter-revolutionary activities. This event would help to form an ambiguous attitude to the Revolution that would stay with him for the rest of his life. He theorised that human history alternated between periods of organisation and disintegration. It was obvious to him that the Revolution was a time of disintegration. He identified the high Middle Ages as the preceding period of organisation, with the ancien régime as its long tail-end. This historiography captured and rationalised Saint-Simon’s ambivalence: whilst the Revolution helped to bring down the faltering ancien régime, it was disorderly and chaotic, only of value as a precursor to a new age.
Influenced by the philosophes Turgot and Condorcet, he adhered to the progressive view of history then dominant in French historiography, which saw history passing through ever more rational phases. Whilst medieval society had been organised according to birth, Saint-Simon hoped that, as history progressed and humanity perfected itself, societies in this New Age would be organised according to the more rational principle of merit. He reasoned that aristocracy was the correct way to organise societies in the past because only those with good breeding had the intelligence to govern. In modernity, however, the masses had become sufficiently intelligent such that it was now possible to establish a system of social organisation in which they could become full members. Since the Revolution, society was now mature enough to proceed from the aristocratic principle of organisation to a more advanced, ‘industrial’ regime, organised around the principle of merit.
In the flames of revolution, he identified Napoleon as the torchbearer of this nascent meritocratic era. Here was a provincial soldier, mocked for his coarse manners and Corsican accent, who rose through the ranks of the army through pure talent and will, defeating the reactionary and aristocratic states of Europe and ruling over most of the continent. Despite his exile to St Helena, Saint-Simon was optimistic that post-Napoleonic Europe would be organised on meritocratic grounds, going so far as sending the essay On the Reorganisation of European Society to the participants of the Congress of Vienna, with the ambition of persuading the assorted plenipotentiaries to conduct their world-historical task and usher in the new age.
His hopes were dashed with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and the return of much of the aristocracy to their old estates. Like Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, Saint-Simon saw himself as a progressive pitted against a hopelessly reactionary society. He was driven to suicide, though survived miraculously. Less confident that the New Age would arrive through providence and historical cunning, he began to draft out his plans for meritocracy in more depth, attracting a sizeable group of disciples, many of whom were intelligent young men from humble backgrounds who would form the so-called ‘Generation of 1820’. The social opportunities of these men had been curtailed by the Bourbon Restoration, which ended the unprecedented social mobility that had flourished under Napoleon: the Indian Summer of the ancien régime meant that men who had previously seemed destined to a brilliant career were now confined to a mere provincial post. They were attracted to Saint-Simon’s promise of a society where their birth did not limit them and their talents would find the appropriate social recognition. After his death, these followers, led by Prosper Enfantin, would shape nineteenth-century French history by leading the colonisation of Algeria and the construction of the Suez Canal.
It is these works from the Bourbon Restoration where Saint-Simon developed his mature thought. He did not explicitly refer to the new age as ‘meritocratic’ – as mentioned at the start of this essay, this term was coined over a century later – instead designating it ‘industrial’. The men who would lead the newly organised Europe were ‘industrialists’, a term he claimed to have coined, and used broadly to refer to businessmen, artists, and scientists alike. As the quote I chose to open this essay with shows, the essential division in society for Saint-Simon is between the ‘industrialists’ and the ‘idlers’; or, simply put, the productive and unproductive. The latter group do not engage in production but live off the work of the former. Paradigmatic of this idler class were the aristocracy.
As an aside, I must warn the reader that I am not here suggesting that the right should turn to a critique of landed aristocracy. The remainder of the British aristocracy that exist are inbred and dim-witted, and do not hold political power anyway. To return to the populism of Lloyd George and pit the ‘peers versus the people’ would be to engage in affected anachronism, an inverted Waughism, and to debase politics into mere aesthetic preference.
Although aristocrats are now mostly irrelevant, the division between the industrialists and the idlers remains crucial to understanding contemporary Britain. As an anonymous contributor to J’Accuse writes in the article ‘Be Deeply Skeptical of Means Testing’,
…there are two fiscal camps in British society; taxpayers (who are decreasing in number and enjoying a lower quality of life) and ‘the Vulnerable’ (who are expanding rapidly), which includes asylum seekers, those claiming universal credit, pensioners, the disabled etc.… the economic privileges of the Vulnerable in Britain are increasingly coming to resemble that of the second estate in France…
On one side, we have the humble stockbroker, the hedge fund manager, and the barrister; on the other, we have the benefit scrounger, the council housing tenant, and the student at ‘London Metropolitan University’. The latter group do not contribute anything useful to society: they are able to subsist only because the former contribute to national output and pay taxes. As for the council housing tenant who receives subsidised rent to live in Central London: who subsidies the rent? Who is displaced and forced to commute to work from the Home Counties?
But the idlers of Britain are not just the ever-expanding underclass. Those in salaried positions can also be classed as idlers. Saint-Simon classified lawyers as idlers, on the grounds that their work amounted to paper-shuffling and the defense of the existing aristocratic order. Even if we reject Saint-Simon’s specific verdict on the lawyers, think of work-from-home civil servants, or people who do ‘comms’ for Woke charities, and apply Saint-Simon’s test: if this group disappeared for a day, would society suffer?
Then, of course, there is the pensioner class, the other main beneficiary of le contrat social – those free bus passes, the Triple Lock, the tax-wrapped pensions – what decadence! Who pays for all this? It is the dwindling taxbase of Britain. There is no-one more oppressed in contemporary Britain than the Oxford PPE graduate or the Cambridge computer scientist. He pays (or will pay) for the nation. He is the contemporary equivalent to a sans-culotte.
Upon the coming of a meritocratic society, Saint-Simon prophesied that the unproductive class will be abolished, and that society would be free to organise itself in the interests of the productive. He envisaged that meritocratic society would be run by a tricameral legislature, with the three types of ‘industrialists’ – producers, scientists, and artists – being represented in each respective body. Here, we can see that Saint-Simon was emphatically not a socialist: very few socialists would extoll the virtue of the industrialist class, and none would claim that they should have direct rule over society. As mentioned above, he used the term ‘industrialist’ to refer to anyone who contributed to the production process, and so included both businessmen and workers. Although he admitted that there will be differences between the industrialists who hold property and those who do not in a later work entitled Letter to the Workers, he nonetheless maintained that they were members of the same class. As such, the right-winger can rest easy: no Marxist division between the ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat’ can be found in Saint-Simon. His distinction between the productive and the idlers is simply a radical exposition of the ideas of the Taxpayers’ Alliance.
If this was all there was to Saint-Simon’s political thought, his critics would be right to relegate him to intellectual obscurity. I urge the reader not to be so hasty. I maintain that he is worth further consideration since, in his response to the Revolution, Saint-Simon provides a defense of inequality, yet does so on progressive grounds. A self-consciously progressive inegalitarian is a rarity and would seem to many, on both the Left and Right, to be a contradiction in terms. For this uniqueness alone, he is worth reading. Saint-Simon comes very close to the politics that Nietzsche gestures towards in The Gay Science when the latter writes
…we ‘conserve’ nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods; we are not by any means ‘liberal’; we do not work for ‘progress’; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future: their song about ‘equal rights’, ‘a free society’, ‘no more masters and no servants’ has no allure to us… We think about the necessity of new orders, also for a new slavery...
Saint-Simon blamed the destruction wrought by the Terror on the sans-culottes’ call for equality, a call he believed was misplaced, since it erred by denying that hierarchy was a prerequisite for civilisation and progress. Although the revolutionaries were correct to criticise the feudal hierarchy based on noble descent, they were mistaken to conclude that all hierarchies were wrong and unnatural. He praised the philosophes for their attacks on the ideological tenets of the ancien régime, yet maintained that their role was only negative, clearing the way for the meritocratic order which he would help to found. Like de Maistre, Saint-Simon was a critic of the levelling that the Revolution wished to achieve; however, instead of responding to the Terror with a defense of the old order, Saint-Simon imagined a new civilisation founded upon a more rational form of inequality.
As mentioned above, Saint-Simon distinguished between the old and new regimes on the grounds that, in the ancien régime, the social hierarchy was based off birth, whilst in the future ‘industrial’ society it would be based off merit. In the former, political power is only loosely correlated with ability due to the retarding influence of birth status, whilst, in the latter, this influence will be eliminated. (Of course, due to the hereditary nature of intelligence, Saint-Simon is wrong to so sharply distinguish merit and birth – understandable for a pre-Darwinian thinker – but his point is clear enough.) It becomes apparent that contemporary Britain bears many of the same characteristics of the ancien régime. With the reactionary assault on grammar schools, the quality of a child’s education is largely dependent on what assets their family owns and whether they can afford to live in the catchment area of a good comprehensive. The likelihood of getting a place on those all-important grad schemes increasingly depends on whether one is born into one of the groups protected under the Equality Act.
The defense of inequality is essential for understanding Saint-Simon’s writings. The philosophes Condorcet and Sieyes visualised France being governed by an enlightened elite and a rational constitution. Saint-Simon agreed: integral to his conception of meritocracy is that, for each of the three classes of industrialist, a natural elite would form, and it is from this elite that the ruling class would be selected. The politicians representing the producer class would be selected from the elite of this class – the great titans of industry. Yet, in responding to the revolutionary egalitarians, Saint-Simon does not turn to the ‘Great Chain of Being’, ‘Divine Right’, or a sentimental Catholicism like de Maistre, for these theories were only able to justify feudalism or royal absolutism, rather than rule by the industrialists. Europe had to abide aristocracy because of the previously undeveloped state of its inhabitants; now the aristocratic principle would only hold progress back.
Instead, he turned to the quickly advancing field of physiology to furnish his anti-egalitarian arguments. Throughout his writings, he proudly acknowledges the influence of physicians such as Jean Burdin and Xavier Bichat. For example, Bichat taught that every organism is composed of three tissues with different basic functions, and that every person tends to be dominated by one of these three tissues, which determines their personality and abilities. Saint Simon used Bichat’s division between three basic physiological types to form his division of the industrialists into three groups (i.e., producers, artists, and scientists).
Burdin and Bichat were members of the Society of Ideologues, a brief political grouping in the Napoleonic era which argued that the study of society was based on physiology. Their ideas would influence Saint-Simon greatly. Prominent in the Ideologues was Pierre Cabanis. Like Saint-Simon, Cabanis was concerned with providing a defense of inequality suitable for the post-revolutionary age, and sought the new science as the means. Starting with the claim that Locke’s argument for human equality was inextricably linked with his associationist psychology, Cabanis blamed the popularity of associationism among scientists in eighteenth-century France, alongside the mechanism inherited from Descartes, for the profusion of egalitarian thought. He argued that physiology showed that there was an ineradicable natural inequality, and philosophes such as Condillac and Helvetius had come to the mistaken belief in human equality only through their ignorance of the subject. Saint-Simon would use Cabanis’s arguments for his own defense of inequality.
Implicit, therefore, in Saint-Simon’s writings is a belief that society should be organised around biological differences; the unfortunate fact that he was writing before Darwin meant that such ideas would, however, remain somewhat undeveloped. What makes meritocracy a more rational society than aristocracy is that the hierarchical principle around the former corresponds to, rather than merely approximates, natural inequality.
A defense of natural inequality is at the heart of Saint-Simon’s conception of society, a fact often missed by scholars. It may be prudent to reflect on Saint-Simon’s relevance to our own age and our own political predicaments.
This article was written by Lucien Chardon, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.
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So he wanted a technocracy guided by the economic objectives from an emerging wealthy liberal industrial elite base? Outside of an IEA student society, I'm not sure how attractive this proposition would be for those on the traditional Right.